What is the meaning to life the universe and everything? ‘42’ ( Adams, 1985 p.94)
Or one could ask: Why is there something rather than nothing?
I my opinion asking these questions make us humans. To start thinking about those questions we need to learn what people before us thought, so we can learn from them to build on their wisdom to continue the human quest for knowledge. The more people participate in this quest the better, because our brains are like snowflakes, everyone's is different and could come up with another missing part of the puzzle. Everyone that doesn't participate in this riddle is a irreplaceable loss. With this blog I would like to awaken the interest for asking these kind of questions in every person from 0-endless ages.
Who started to ask those questions? It might have started way earlier, but the first one we know of are the ancient Greece in around 600 BCE. We learned and solved a lot of those questions since then. For example: What is the earth made of? Another questions that we are still trying to answer is: How and out of what was our world created? Let's see what they came up with:
Thales (625-545 BCE) saw that water changes between mist, steam, and ice. From his observation he concluded that our world developed from water and this explains how everything in our world is always changing.
Anaximenes of Miletus (611-547 BCE) agreed on one thing with Thales, that the world emerged from one substance. He thought that in the beginning there was only air which got thicker and thicker so that everything emerged from it, wind, clouds, soil, stones and so on. He also thought that there must be a secret ingredient that make the four basic elements which he were known back then: earth, water, air and fire.
Leucippus (500 BCE) and his student Democritus (470-380) thought that everything is made of one thing. They called these tiniest building blocks that were so small that no one could divide them into smaller parts atoms. These atoms would clump together in different ways to make up everything in the world.
Isn't this an amazing thought considering the tools and knowledge the people had back then? How did they come up with those theories? Let's learn more from our ancestors....
I my opinion asking these questions make us humans. To start thinking about those questions we need to learn what people before us thought, so we can learn from them to build on their wisdom to continue the human quest for knowledge. The more people participate in this quest the better, because our brains are like snowflakes, everyone's is different and could come up with another missing part of the puzzle. Everyone that doesn't participate in this riddle is a irreplaceable loss. With this blog I would like to awaken the interest for asking these kind of questions in every person from 0-endless ages.
Who started to ask those questions? It might have started way earlier, but the first one we know of are the ancient Greece in around 600 BCE. We learned and solved a lot of those questions since then. For example: What is the earth made of? Another questions that we are still trying to answer is: How and out of what was our world created? Let's see what they came up with:
Thales (625-545 BCE) saw that water changes between mist, steam, and ice. From his observation he concluded that our world developed from water and this explains how everything in our world is always changing.
Anaximenes of Miletus (611-547 BCE) agreed on one thing with Thales, that the world emerged from one substance. He thought that in the beginning there was only air which got thicker and thicker so that everything emerged from it, wind, clouds, soil, stones and so on. He also thought that there must be a secret ingredient that make the four basic elements which he were known back then: earth, water, air and fire.
Leucippus (500 BCE) and his student Democritus (470-380) thought that everything is made of one thing. They called these tiniest building blocks that were so small that no one could divide them into smaller parts atoms. These atoms would clump together in different ways to make up everything in the world.
Isn't this an amazing thought considering the tools and knowledge the people had back then? How did they come up with those theories? Let's learn more from our ancestors....
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